2.21.2011

Kotobi Church #2

In addition to stones, sand, cement, and bricks, another critical--and somewhat scarce--building material for the church was water. We were fortunate to have the remnants of a small river about a half mile from the church, and with the use of one Toyota Landcruiser pickup, about fifteen 25L jerry cans, and the help of what often seemed like twice that many eager little volunteers, we kept well-supplied with the precious stuff.

We poured the slab in four sections over about a week. It's quite a lot of work when you're doing everything by hand. We hired four guys to mix concrete and Luke and I and Sylvester (our head builder) spread, screeded, floated, troweled, and finished it. The reason why that section is wet is because slab strength increases with drying time.

Here we've just started laying up the walls. Behind the right corner, in the little cleared area you can just see where the hole for the pit latrine is being dug.

This is a shot of the front yard of Pastor Julius' house in Kotobi, where we stayed during the week. The blue mosquito net on the right is where I slept most of the time; Luke stayed in the tent behind it. You can see Luke starting breakfast in the background. For a while it was quite cold in the mornings, meaning that we were quite motivated to get a fire going and start cooking oatmeal!

This isn't market day, nor is it all of the market, but I think you can get a pretty decent idea of what the Kotobi Market was like from the picture. Every day, 6-10 ladies (and a few men) would gather under these trees with their rough lemons/oranges, sweet potatoes, cassava flour, mandazis (fried dough balls), packets of glucose biscuits, local bread (similar to white, low sodium hot dog buns), various greens, papayas, bags of Gnut paste (peanut butter), beans, sesame seeds, onions, and cooking oil.